ECE News Story

Dachman-Soled Wins ORAU Award for Junior Faculty

Dachman-Soled Wins ORAU Award for Junior Faculty

Assistant Professor Dana Dachman-Soled

ECE Assistant Professor and Maryland Cybersecurity Center affiliate, Dana Dachman-Soled has been selected to receive the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award which will support her research collaboration with Professor Gang Qu in "Threat Models and Practical, Provably Secure Architecture for the Secure Scan-Chain Problem.” This award provides seed money for research by junior faculty at Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) member institutions. The award is intended to enrich the research and professional growth of young faculty and result in new funding opportunities. ORAU will commit five thousand dollars to the project and the University of Maryland will match that award.

Dachman-Soled states that the broad goals of the project are to develop rigorous threat models for hardware security, to design practical and provably secure schemes that achieve these notions by integrating techniques from hardware security and cryptography, and to implement and test these new designs. “We consider side channel attacks that exploit access to scan-chains to learn information about the private state of an integrated circuit (IC).” Scan-chains are Design-for-Testability (DfT) structures, which enable testing by providing a mechanism to directly set and observe the values of flip-flops in an IC. Unfortunately, an unintended side-effect of scan-chains is to render a device vulnerable to side-channel attacks. In this project, Dachman-Soled studies methods to protect against such attacks, while still maintaining the utility of the scan-chain for testing purposes.

Dachman-Soled was one of two faculty members from the University of Maryland who were submitted as nominees for this program. She is one of only 35 investigators selected to receive the 2015 – 2016 awards from a pool of 134 nationwide.